If the textual evolution from “Old Times” to Life on the Mississippi initiates the dialectic of Twain's novelistic career, the production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn completes its first full cycle. The two boyhood fictions readily testify to their complementary relationships with the ostensibly nonfiction texts. There are significant similarities between the “Old Times” cub and Tom Sawyer. Just as the cub learns to read the signs of the river in order to become a respected and highly paid pilot, so Tom learns to read and manipulate the conventions of the social code in order to become a conspicuous American success. Even one-upping Twain's cub-pilot persona, Tom wins not only fame and fortune but also the girl. In addition, the form of Tom Sawyer is, like “Old Times,” a kind of bildungsroman–epic hybrid. After Tom survives his trial in the underworld of McDougal's cave, Judge Thatcher compares him to George Washington, the epic hero of whom McGuffey's Readers so often sang. Tom thus metamorphoses from an irritating yet amusing juvenile delinquent into something like an American epic hero.

Huck's story, on the other hand, drifts along like part 2 of the Mississippi book, incident following incident without the kind of teleological goal that motivates Tom's calculated quest for celebrity.